Case emerges from broader struggle of Gullah Geechee community to protect land and heritage from development, gentrification, and systemic erasure

April 30, 2025, Beaufort, SC – Descendants of enslaved people on St. Helena Island in South Carolina brought a lawsuit today in an effort to preserve their ancestral burial grounds and cultural traditions at their community’s generations-old cemetery. Property owners have installed locked gates that, in violation of long-established South Carolina law and Gullah Geechee burial practices, prevent community members from exercising their right to visit, maintain, and hold burials at the sacred site, the suit says. 

The plaintiffs – the Big House Cemetery Committee, Shanoma Watson, Julia B. Scott, Jimmy Pope, Sheila and Tamika Middleton, Mary Mack, Pastor Leroy Haynes, Sherike Bennett, Sherika Chisolm, and Arlene Covington -- hail from one of the largest remaining Gullah Geechee communities, which is waging a broad struggle to preserve its land and heritage from development and gentrification on St. Helena Island. Cemeteries are under particular threat because, according to custom, they are often located on valuable waterfront property.

Big House Cemetery and the surrounding area were once part of a plantation, where the ancestors of some plaintiffs and other local community members were likely enslaved. Following a tradition that dates back to slavery, the plaintiffs had continued to bury their loved ones and preserved their plots at the cemetery throughout their lives. Oceanside burials are significant to the Gullah Geechee community, as they beleive their loved ones' souls use the water to return to Africa in death. 

But in May 2024, after allowing access to the cemetery for several years after she purchased and moved to the property, defendant Theresa Ainger abruptly blocked access through a locked gate, rendering it completely inaccessible to vehicles–the only route that the public, including plaintiffs, had used to reach the cemetery for burials, visits, and maintenance. She has rejected the plaintiffs’ and other community members’ attempts to negotiate access. Defendants Robert Cody Harper and Robert Walter Harper, Jr. then installed a separate gate that blocked access to the entrance to the cemetery. In May 2024, when five members of the community died in a three-car crash, their families could not bury them alongside their kin and had to use a cemetery twenty miles away. The rest of the community also has been unable to reach the cemetery for burials, maintenance, and visits with loved ones for the last year.

“The Big House Cemetery has been in our family and community for as long as I can remember. It’s an opportunity for us to show that we just don’t love our ancestors in life, but we love them in death. Without access, we cannot mourn and honor relatives and other loved ones buried at the Cemetery,” said Mary Mack, a plaintiff as well as the chairperson of the Big House Cemetery Committee, an organizational plaintiff in the case that has advocated to regain access for the local community to the cemetery. 

“ I would love for the road to be used permanently to visit loved ones – like it has been,” added Jimmy Pope, Ms. Mack’s brother, who is both a plaintiff in the case and a member of the committee.

Filed on the plaintiffs’ behalf by the Center for Constitutional Rights and co-counsel, attorney Tyler Bailey of the Bailey Firm, the lawsuit says the defendants’ actions violate South Carolina law, which protects the rights of people to use cemeteries to bury and visit their loved ones. By denying access, the defendants are also violating the right to use and enjoy an easement, or right-of-way, on a road to access the cemetery that the plaintiffs and local community have used and enjoyed under South Carolina law for at least the last several decades. The plaintiffs are asking for the court to declare that they have rights to access, visit, and maintain the cemetery and to use and enjoy the easement; order the defendants’ to ensure access to the cemetery; and award money for emotional and economic harm for the defendants’ obstructions. 

“South Carolina law is clear: descendants, like our clients, must be accorded the right to visit, maintain, and care for the graves of their family and other loved ones buried in Big House Cemetery,” according to Emily Early, Associate Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Southern Regional Office.  “These landowners’ attempts to block descendants’ access to the cemetery are shameful attempts to erase longstanding cultural practices of this local Black community and must not be tolerated.” 

The Gullah Geechee descend from enslaved people from west and central Africa forced to work in the lowlands of the southeastern United States. Largely isolated, they developed their own language and culture in the antebellum era, and after the Civil War, St. Helena Island was one of the first places to welcome newly emancipated Black people. On St. Helena and the other Sea Islands, formerly enslaved people established self-governance, financial independence, and self-determination earlier than anywhere else in the country. 

Gullah Geechee communities on other Sea Islands, such as Tybee Island and James Island, have also fought for the right to access and visit their family members at burial grounds. More broadly, many Gullah Geechee communities, including the one on Sapelo Island, have struggled to keep autonomy over their ancestral land. As new developments and unfamiliar residents enter areas designated to the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, families of formerly enslaved people are routinely blocked from public access to burial grounds. 

For more information, please see the case page.